This is Chuck Whelon's slightly circuitously routed translation to US comics of UK comedy takes on American sf and fantasy genres. The templates here are Adams and Pratchett, as evidenced in narrative ploys like 'Space is enormously, intensely, incredibly, infinitely big' etc and in the figure of Porfingles, a barely competent wizard, as main character.
Equally the fun, as in the Discworld and Hitch-hiker series, is derived from undermining the grandiose sweep of genre convention with everyday banality - such as the Earth destroyed to make way for an interplanetary traffic bypass - while using its generic framework to develop a narrative.
A few plot elements should give you a flavour of the storyline. An implacable girlie alien, dressed like an SS pole-dancer from the video of Mel Brooks's 'Hitler Rap', lands in Spirekassle. Carrying a huge machine gun, she terrorises the town's inhabitants and shoots Bish Bathenwell, acolyte of the goddess Hornbag and friend of Pewfell Porfingles. Pewfell is esconced in The Hog Nuts after a night's drinking with two of his other friends, local villain Pedwyn the Jackle and Fug the barbarian. Turfed out of the pub after refusing to pay up, Pewfell and Pedwyn make a hash of dealing with the alien invader until Pewfell's orc-slaying wife turns up. Pewfell finally accedes to pressure from his wife to tidy his room but, while doing it, is distracted by the sight in his crystal ball of Bish's soul with Hornbag crying out for help. Pewfell rushes off to find Bish's body and bring it back to life again, forgetting that he still hasn't tidied his room...
Inevitably the arrival of Pottermania has skewed discussion of genre fantasy but Whelon's relatively incidental references to hogs and warts (The Hog Nuts is Pewfell's boozer of choice and Warts is a day of the week) clearly made it into print while Joanna Rowling's bestseller would have been a mere information sheet listing on her commissioning editor's hard drive. Add to this Whelon's enduring attachment to the conversational affectations for which British speech provides such a rich resource and it's plain that what we're talking about here is what consumer magazine reviewers would call an 'eclectic mix'.
Of course, fantasy is not exactly an uncrowded field in comic publishing. Unlike his many counterparts, however, Whelon self-publishes in the small press and in these two issues, doesn't have quite the wherewithal to develop his stories at length. To their detriment, his ideas seem cramped and confined in the small space he has available. In issue 3, this is compounded as the drawings start off in halftone, which doesn't work as all detail is lost. But the rest of the comic is cluttered anyway as Whelon crams too many panels on a page and fills too many of those panels with hatching. In issue four there are more pages and Whelon dispenses with the hatching. As a result the drawing is tidier and the story is more lucid. Although there are still too many panels - I counted 11 on one - on this comic's A5 pages, there are sequences which show how much more powerfully Whelon's drawing can be put in service of his comedy's intentions.
Steve Edgell